I spent the summer of 2007 at CERN as part of their Summer Student program.
For a summary of what kind of work I did see "Managing the ATLAS BPTX data".
This page is intended to be the hub to my summer in Geneva. It will contain stuff on my project, reminders, useful links for living, TODOs, etc.
I am going to be at CERN from June, 25th to Sep, 7th, living in the Foyer Robert Schuman and working on monitoring the phase relation between the LHC machine clock and the bunches for the ATLAS experiment.
Fellow Summies
If you are a summie feel free to add a link to your website, blog, facebook profile, etc here. There is a google group called "Cern summer students 2007" with a mailing list and so on. Idea: do people use irc? where do you hang out?
Jan from Prague, http://picasaweb.google.com/j.scheirich?pli=1
Irish Conor in Edinburgh http://void.printf.net/~conor
Maja Rullgard, Stockholm, http://www.physto.se/~maja (not much of a web page but it's the best I've got)
Joel Johansson http://www.joeljohansson.se/ and if you can read Swedish his blog
My project
My project supervisor was Thilo Pauly. I wrote a set of tools used by the Beam Timing experiment, they allow you to do the following:
periodically take the gathered data and publish it to the COOL database
- calculate statistics on the data and publish these to COOL
retrieving data from COOL and dump it into a ROOT Ntuple
- basic housekeeping
The Beam Timing Experiment can measure properties of each individual bunch in the LHC machine. The most interesting property is the phase of the beam, this is the time between clock ticks and actual bunches arriving at the interaction point of ATLAS.
I also wrote a small tool to quickly inspect the ATLAS event stream and determine which sub-detectors are not properly timed in yet. For each sub-detector it looks at the reported Bunch Crossing Id(BCID) and compares it to the reference BCID. When all sub-detectors are in sync they will all report the same BCID.
Reading links
Most of these links turned out not to be that relevant, but interesting reading none the less.
To get an overview and learn some acronyms the ATLAS TDR is very useful.
Links harvested by a quick google:
Experimental Methods&Colliders -- on pdg, for a general overview of detectors. Possibly to high level, do they have a "further reading" list?
ATLAS Trigger homepage -- its a wiki, most of it probably only makes sense for people working on the project.
The first-level trigger of ATLAS -- from 2005, presented at a conference so should be understandable (citations?)
Level2 trigger -- website of the oxford people involved in the lelve2 trigger.
The level-1 trigger bases its decision on data from [google:muon%20chambers muon chambers] and [google:calorimeters]. A brief intro to the level-1 trigger(beware this might be the old, static, outdated page).
Central trigger collects stuff from the following two triggers(and others?):
Requirements Document for the ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger, promises a "descriptive part", maybe worth a quick browse.
Barrel Muon Trigger and Endcap muon trigger are the two muon triggers.